by Tony Burgess
She raises the cup to her mouth but stops halfway. The gesture is not surprising, an index of intellectual life: her face twitches once to release the pause, and she brings the mug to her lips. She pushes the rim with her tongue, breaching the sipping seal, and coffee flows across her chin. It turns in a black braid down her neck and fans out through the fabric of her red T-shirt. Ellen Peterson is the reeve for Pontypool, Bewdley and Caesarea. She married Detective Peterson twelve years ago when he was just an OPP officer and she was a real estate agent. She managed to be successfully elected reeve because of her passion and familiarity with the rural life of the area. Ellen has never lived in a city, and her sophistication and intelligence are considered by her constituents to be the best of their own. She has pioneered a sensibility for rural Ontario that will carry it into the next millennium with as much wit and ability as her urban counterparts. And what’s more, she will bring the mystery of the backroads to sluggish minds in boardrooms. Ellen Peterson is also a member of a local sisterhood of Wicca, and the Bewdley Seers’ Festival is a project that she lovingly organizes, with some anonymity, at a careful distance from the office she holds. This past year of Ellen’s life, however, has been shot with a tragedy of devastating proportion.
On May 19, 1995, Ellen Peterson was attempting to intervene in what she perceived was a rash seizure of property by the game warden. The warden had stumbled on a family of four standing nearly waist deep in a small river-fed pond. The family were slapping the water with surveyor’s stakes as they ran back and forth, falling and squealing. As he got closer the game warden realized that they were playing a sort of British Bulldog with a school of carp. When the family saw the man they rushed back up to shore, more embarrassed and excited than aware that they were doing anything wrong. None of the carp was harmed, and in fact many of them left the game to mate upstream with renewed vigour.
Ellen didn’t see any harm in what they were doing, but the warden tried to describe the removal of surveyor’s stakes as vandalism, or at least as an illegal use of spears. He wanted to seize the family home and prosecute to the full extent of the law. Ellen recognized a man whose heart, unlike her husband’s, would beat faster if only the world were just a little more crooked than it already is.
As she looked for a phrase that would let the game warden and the family off the hook, a phrase that didn’t include the word eager, Ellen had a stroke. The stroke was the first of three that would hit her over the next year, each one dropping her deeper beneath the last, placing a baffling distance between her thought and the words that negotiate it. The second stroke caused the doctors to prematurely diagnose Pick’s disease, a gradual shrinking of the brain. This was suggested when a brain scan and several tests, involving draining her brain pan of fluid and inflating it with air, revealed a wider gap than a previous test. For days Ellen lay in the hospital, frightened by the fierce pain and the needle jolts of electricity in her head. Whenever she turned her head on the pillow her brain slid off its cushion of air and clunked, like a bumper car, into a corner of her skull.
After the third stroke and a third scan the doctors noticed that the affected area had changed appearance, shrinking from the size and shape of Sarnia to that of, say, Bewdley. Their prognosis this time was brighter. No organic damage. A part of her brain had been sealed off from the rest, and its contents needed to be coached out of the shadow they’d been cast in and reintroduced to the engines of their history: the physical context of their temporarily unavailable contents. The doctors thought that two years of therapy could bring her language back fully. When asked if she would be able to function as well as she had, however, they responded honestly: no.
Detective Peterson was given the impression that he had asked for too much and from then on he felt uneasy, like he was offending every doctor he consulted. Ellen kept her job as reeve and her secret position in the Wiccan religion. Detective Peterson knew this was the desire of the community — but only until the world replaced the role model that it had so wantonly destroyed. The sadness and, at times, the despair of the detective and the people of Pontypool were matched only by the millions of tiny tears shed by twenty-four thousand carp as they squeezed out their eggs and misted them with sperm. These tears lost their distinctive drop shape in the current of the river and were thus saved from appearing sentimental. They sank to the bottom and formed a rough fur of salted water over stones. Sediment.
The detective, on the other hand, took to sentimentalizing everything. He refused to treat Ellen differently, though she had become a different person, and he felt his own denial as a terrible sentence that he alone must unfairly endure. If her mood lightened, which it did sometimes in the afternoon, he felt a searing rage. And when, at night, fatigue caused her to repeat the words dead … dead over and over again, he felt a calmness fall over the house. At these times he also felt joy.
A walk through the kitchen for him contained enough signs of their other life together that he sometimes ate out for several days in a row to avoid being confronted by a past that, as the doctors had said, could be expected to return someday — changed, reduced, perverse. This was what frightened the detective the most. The return.
After her third stroke Ellen’s therapy began to take, and her progress exceeded the expectations of the specialists. She was able to go out and shop for groceries, provided that she rehearsed the shopping list before heading off. Ellen prepared for these outings tirelessly, and except for the occasional tantrum, usually triggered by having to make an unexpected decision, she was successful: decision making was often accompanied by terrible sensations.
Each shopping list disappeared from her when it was discarded. Along with it, the domestic life signified by the taxonomy was also lost. Ellen experienced these words and lists as thick, heavy blanks and their weight pulled at the muscles in her back. In order to make the words bearable she cored them with noise, a bright, prickling noise that vacuumed the area inside and immediately around them. Doing this, she was able to lift herself from the couch or walk into the kitchen.
Soon, as she stood in front of a stack of frozen fish or sat over a pile of unsigned documents, Ellen began detailing, with a meticulousness and energy she had never known, a catalogue of seals, made hermetic by the new shoots that were growing off the signs of her world. A pentagram of signatures burned against the side of a trout, its eye a frozen pea, the “P” that begins her last name.
A tomato was told to keep all of the events of her life before the stroke beneath the sheen of its skin. It was obedient.
In her tomato, in one of its tiny translucent seeds, Ellen has every plot of land she ever sold. Stored there are her various machines for telling the future.
She now studies future images in the afternoon, before the sun abandons her to suicide, and she translates them, using another set of machines sealed between the halves of an adjacent seed. Many of the images depict scenes of murder, but Ellen knows they only shock her to get her attention.
Occasionally, however, she will open a seal and a brief piece of song or snippet of conversation will make her laugh at some discrepancy. This is the mischief of her seals and machines.
10
A BULL MARKET
Ellen bites the tip of her tongue to squeeze the coffee from it and she tastes blood the moment she drops her mug. The sound of the mug as it spins and stops, hitting the leg of the table, causes her to cry. She bunches up the cold wet of her shirt and pushes her fists into her mouth. She clenches her eyes shut, feeling the blankness of the event scare her, and she hears the voice of a little girl in her mouth.
Detective Peterson hears his wife’s strange sobs and he pounds up the stairs, remembering as he gets to the top: Don’t make a big deal of this, don’t make a big deal of this. When he reaches the television room Ellen is holding herself tightly, straining to keep the voice from her throat. The detective slips in beside her and gently loosens the knot of her arms. He guides
her head onto his shoulder and encourages her to cry. She does, and it’s the cry of a grown woman, full of softness for the little girl who is so scared. While he rocks his wife Detective Peterson realizes, without guilt, that none of this is Ellen’s fault. He says, “Is banned, in cape.” She looks up, grateful for the words; restored, she feels his affection diminish the barrier. The detective has failed to notice that he did not, in fact, say the words It’s ok, it’s ok. Rather, he felt their effect on Ellen. At this point he feels ashamed, knowing how wrong he was to have blamed her. Detective Peterson scoops up the mug and asks Ellen if she wants another and she explains to him that she’s already had two cups and maybe better not. He kisses her cheek and leaves the room, turning back as he steps into the hallway to ask if she wants to watch television with him later. She says that she would, it has been so long. Television has been a source of great anguish to her, but maybe now, with her husband sitting beside her, it would be like it was. Detective Peterson walks into the kitchen just as the phone rings.
“Hello?”
“Detective?”
“Yes?”
“We need a report on what happened this afternoon. The sergeant has called in the RCS on this one. They think we got more than one killer. We gotta find Les Reardon.”
“Purse snatch … purse snatch … fucker …”
Peterson lowers the phone and feels a wind across his face. Bits of words catch in the sunlight across the top of the stove like barbs off a wire. He swings the receiver through them and they part in eddies around his wrist. He brings the phone back up to his ear.
“What? Detective Peterson, are you there? Hello?”
“Hello?”
“Yeah, sir, what did you say?”
“What?”
“What did you say?”
“Say?”
“Yeah, what did you say?”
“Say?”
“Are you OK, sir?”
“Is barn, is messy.”
“I think I’ll come out there, sir, if that’s all right. I gotta couple of things to do first, but I think I’ll come out there. Is that all right, sir?”
Peterson thinks, Well, there isn’t anything wrong. I’m fine for fuck’s sake, I just can’t seem to say so. And he says:
“Dirty dump … dirty day.”
“Uh … detective, we have a very serious situation unfolding in the region and if you don’t think you can … uh … handle it right now … I have to tell somebody.”
“Dirty, dirty, dirty.”
Peterson places the phone back in its cradle. He hears his wife call his name and he jumps. A flash of rage fills his chest. He runs into the living room and snatches the TV Guide before dashing up the stairs. By the time he reaches the top he calms again. He hears Ellen singing softly to herself. The song is very familiar. He can’t name it. As he enters the television room and lays the TV Guide in her lap he asks her what the song is. She tells him and he smiles, remembering its source. He hums a bar as he flips the macramé throw over the top of the television screen. Ellen suggests a television show and the detective pretends to consider it — he’s going to watch whatever she wants, and eventually smiles at her choice. The television pops on and the Rembrandt hues of a soap opera appear. This is the program they had decided on, and as they settle in each other’s arms to begin watching it they both feel an identical discomfort. Without discussing it Ellen switches the channel until she finds something. It happens to be exactly what the detective would have chosen.
Night Court. A rerun.
As Bull looks for a place to hide a mop, the Petersons nod to the closet that waits off camera.
11
NADIA COMANECI
The moon breaks into little pieces and sprinkles itself as confetti onto the front lawn of the Peterson household. A man in uniform steps up to the front door. He lays the back of his hand flat across the doorbell and by sinking his second knuckle he depresses the button.
Inside the house, up the flight of stairs that the front door opens to, is the television room. Detective Peterson sits up on the edge of the couch, straightening his arms to his knees. His head turns in the direction of the door. His eyes are new. Near him a wounded caribou pulls at a leg wedged in ice. Ellen looks to him, in the way she has had to these last few months, and when the bell rings a second time he turns on her, clasping one hand around her face and the other across the back of her neck. He attempts to shush her, but his teeth are too wet and his bottom lip is too sloppy.
The Honeymoon in Aphasia is over.
Detective Peterson’s difficulties speaking have spread out to his face, and now, in his panic, he feels that he must escape through the only door left open: his own mouth.
Ellen scrambles to resurrect the barrier between them — He is sick, really sick — and she rolls her tomato backwards from the corner of her mouth, subtracting the afternoon. Something is wrong with my husband. He’s holding my head like a newspaper. The detective drops Ellen’s head from his hands, giving her neck an assaultive twist, and he leaps from the couch. He pulls a painting off the wall and throws it across the television. Ellen has a sudden impatience with her own disorder and she belts her better self into action. She rises off the couch. He’s willing to break his own neck to stop me. She pushes her husband back against the wall and runs up the hall and down the stairs.
Before she can reach the bottom her husband’s body rolls against the backs of her legs. She knows the level this has reached. So fast. He’s going to break his neck to stop me. Ellen sweeps aside her disability with a flat hand on her husband’s back and she vaults over his pommel horse body. The detective spins and swipes at her ankle before she reaches the door.
The man on the other side enters the scene by slamming his body against the barrier. Ellen has rolled out of the way and the new man in her life is wrapped around the old one. The uniform pulls his head back to take in what he holds in his arms. No time. A hot mouth clamps onto his lips and sinks its teeth to close them. The uniform feels the power of an industrial press punching into the centre of his face.
Ellen scuttles backwards down the hall, and as her husband flicks his head she hears the snap of both men’s necks breaking. The detective drops the body to the ground and he turns his damaged upper torso toward Ellen. His mouth is full and he releases the contents down his shirt, hissing across bloody teeth. His bottom lip jumps up to make a consonant but falls short and swings slack across his chin. He sways his head, grinding the break in his neck. Ellen thinks she sees a wolf appear in shadow across the back of his throat and she fires at the blue moon of his uvula.
The already taxed anatomy of the detective surrenders utterly to the bullet and his head lifts from his shoulders; clear of them, it flips like a coin. The head drops to the floor, sitting against the door on the empty sock of its neck, and looks directly at Ellen. The look, though inanimate, is fresh with the experience of abjection, of failure. This look, familiar to the followers of zombies, is not entirely new to Ellen either. And if she weren’t so tightly packaged with terror she would, probably, cry.
12
FISH BOY
The long pier in Port Perry floats its spine out into Lake Scugog, and among its ribs bob long sanitary sailboats with their own spare and polished spines. Seagulls lead each other’s capes in and off the tips of these skeletons, keeping the temperature just past winter with their cries. A great deal of soap floats in white castles out from the orange waterlines of the boats and they repel the surface slicks of gasoline like poles meeting. A boy wearing an outsized captain’s hat that loops off his head sits on the edge of a boat watching the patterns of gasoline as they leap clear on the smooth woven surface of the water. A giant goldfish, in fat flames, appears below. The boy catches his breath. The carp is almost as big as he is. The two creatures hang in the air marvelling at their equal volume, sharing the suspension, the yellow light of
gills and the white ring of an ankle. The carp leans off the surface and carries its glow to the bottom, disappearing from the boy, who looks up at the seagulls that have brought their paper flight to within feet of him. He thinks that if clouds could shit they’d shit seagulls. He notices an empty boat floating close to shore across the harbour.
Les Reardon opens his eyes and watches a seagull at his feet tearing through the back of a perch. He slams the side of the boat with his foot, but the seagull doesn’t move. He flaps both his legs apart, hitting the sides, and this time the bird jumps into the air. It rises a foot or two and then returns inverted, standing this time with the tip of its beak through the forehead of the fish. Les leaps up and, missing the bird, squishes the desiccated fish in his hands, sending it in a slurp up into the air and overboard. The seagull hangs above his head, screaming, and finally lifts backward.
On shore Les discovers he has difficulty walking. He steps around sloppily on guitar-shaped legs until a succession of steps brings him out of the sand and onto a brown lawn. An elderly woman, in a purple silk bathrobe, is standing on the clean bare floor of a bare room that looks out at the lake through a tall window. She watches the man who has just appeared in her backyard. He appears drunk. Filthy. She slides the door open a few inches, sniffing at the outside before speaking.
“Hello there. Can I help you?”
Les waves at her as he steps forward. He approaches the woman deceitfully. She only has time to say “Oh my!” before he knocks her to the floor. A little bald man in pyjamas appears squinting at the bar in the corner of the room, and he takes three quick steps toward his fallen wife. He is also knocked over by Les.
This couple distinguish themselves from the Killings by being the Knockouts.